Please Join Us!

About This Week’s Chat About Having Tough Conversations

“When we avoid difficult conversations, we trade short term discomfort for long term dysfunction.” – Peter Bromberg

John is the senior operations manager of the production department at a gold mine. If his department doesn’t operate well, the mine doesn’t make money. Production can’t come to a standstill for any reason other than planned maintenance.

A recent squabble between senior supervisors Kyle and Newton led to them giving different orders to their teams. This incident caused production to lapse for a few hours, and the resulting loss amounted to $1m.

John knows there is a personality clash between the two supervisors. Their differences has caused issues before, but never anything as serious as this. Because their clash has now affected production, John has to have a conversation with them.

John has put off talking to them previously because he knows it is going to be a tough conversation. Both of the supervisors are at least 10 years older than him, and they have more years’ work experience than him. He also knows personality and values are tricky issues to address because people tend to get defensive. He sometimes avoids talking about an issue because he wants to avoid conflict.

In our Twitter poll last week, we asked people what their main reasons were for avoiding tough conversations. More than 60 percent said they didn’t want conflict. Almost 20 percent avoided having tough conversations because of previous bad experiences.

In this week’s #MTtalk chat, called “Being Brave: Having Tough Conversations,” we’ll discuss tools and tips to help you to prepare for those difficult conversations. Have a look at the following questions to spark some thoughts in preparation for the chat:

How do you prepare for a tough conversation?

What do you do to keep calm and clear-headed during a tough conversation?

At Mind Tools, we enjoy hearing from people all over the world who share their thoughts and experiences with us. We’d like you to participate in the #MTtalk chat, too, this Friday at 1pm EST (6pm GMT). Remember, we feature great participant responses right here on our blog every week!

How to Join

Follow us on Twitter to make sure that you don’t miss out on any of the action this Friday! We’ll be tweeting out 10 questions during our hour-long chat. To participate in the chat, type #MTtalk in the Twitter search function. Then, click on “All Tweets” and you’ll be able to follow the live chat feed. You can join the chat by using the hash tag #MTtalk in your responses.